Kathleen Loves Music

Earle Warren & Phil Schaap, Columbia University, 1985; Photography by Nancy Miller Elliott

Phil Schaap’s obsessive nature has made him an invaluable resource in the world of jazz (and plagued many of his relationships he’s had that I’ve witnessed). And he’s become such a fixture in the New York radio community that the editor of The New Yorker has devoted an extensive profile of Phil this week that I’d recommend to anyone who loves Charlie Parker.

Anyone who knows Phil (he and I were in college radio in the early 70s; he still broadcasts on the station today) can argue pro and con for slightly less long than his description of a, say, 1947 Count Basie recording session, but I found his philosophy of jazz incredibly refreshing when he told me about it at a bar in 1999, and is recounted in the profile:

“The school system is creating six thousand unemployable musicians a year—from the Berklee College of Music, Rutgers, Mannes, Manhattan, Juilliard, plus all the high schools,” he said. “There are more and more musicians, and no gigs, no one to listen. So what happens to these kids? They work their way back to the educational system and help create more unemployable musicians. My rant is this: I’m not trying to teach you to play the alto sax. No. I’m trying to get you to learn how to listen to Charlie Parker.”

Phil Schaap by Risko

My only sadness for Phil’s legacy is that his nature is such that most of his encyclopedic knowledge has not been archived (as far as I, or anyone I know, knows) and most of it will be lost to the world with him. We still have his thousands of hours of irreplaceable interviews with jazz artists, and I can only hope my college radio station hasn’t mishandled them more than we know they already have.

(Except for diehards and jazz radio archivists, this is a good place to click away from this page.)

While I’m on the subject of Phil and jazz radio on WKCR, Columbia University (impossible to untangle) I thought I’d add a couple of small comments to an interview he gave on the subject a few years ago:

Phil kindly mentions a bit of my influence on making jazz a crucial part of New York radio’s legacy behind Jamie Katz, Sharif Abdus-Salaam, Alan Goodman, Jim Carroll, and, of course, himself. He neglects a more critical and deep influence on a number of us, a true eclectic with many obsessions, particularly jazz, David Reitman.

The role of the jazz birthday marathons mentioned in the interview (and profile) play a large, and rightful, role in Phil’s legacy. He neglects, or doesn’t know, their actual source. During the stodgy years of WKCR in the 50s & 60s they had an annual ritual, the Beethoven’s Birthday 24 hour radio marathon. We jazzbos were annoyed that the classical department (which bored many of us) got such a hunk or airtime. Why didn’t the “classical” musicians of modern America, the jazz musicians, get the same honor? When Alber Ayler died we spontaneous absconded with the format for our own purposes and codified it with Coltrane’s birthday in 1971.

There were a number of jazz performances recorded in the studio (I was the engineer of most of the earliest ones) and subsequently released on record. The first was Gunter Hampel’s Spirits with Jeanne Lee and Perry Robinson.

–Fred